


Pelor's light

by Bitterblue



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, anyway this is canon now, de Rolo family FEELS, intersex Percy, just making everyone trans, threw in some real weird references for my own amusement, trans percy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-23 19:37:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12514988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitterblue/pseuds/Bitterblue
Summary: No one especially cares what sort of child the third born de Rolo is: it is a baby, a spare to the spare, and that's enough.Confused, trans baby Percy figuring things out.





	Pelor's light

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [moon threads](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11407482) by [Bitterblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitterblue/pseuds/Bitterblue). 



> Bonus thanks to cacheese for the enthusiasm along the way.

No one especially cares what sort of child the third born de Rolo is: it is a baby, a spare to the spare, and that's enough. **  
**

This turns out to be a good thing, as the midwife frowns as she ties off the cord to pass the baby up to the Lady, exhausted, red-faced, and crying slightly (both mother and child). "I'm afraid I don't...I've never seen anything  _like_  it, ma'am. Bit like a boy, but more than a bit like a girl, as well. We could call for a cleric of Pelor?"

Lady Johanna shakes her head a little, cradling the baby to her chest. Outside, a low rumble of thunder announces the breaking of a storm that has been brewing all evening, followed by the  _pit pat_  of rain against the windows of the castle. The baby blinks up at her with the same blue eyes of her older two children, then begins to wail. "Not just yet. In the morning." The rain intensifies. "It can wait until morning."

 

* * *

They don't name the baby at first. Keeper Yennen turns up in the late morning of that first day, inspecting the infant, but all he can say is that he is not entirely certain. No one seems to be entirely certain. The baby doesn't seem to care overmuch about existential or metaphysical questions.

Standing in the nursery after nursing the week-old baby ("It isn't proper for a Lady—" "No one is going to care if I nurse my own children, I'm not displacing some woman's own child so she can wetnurse  _mine_!") (the argument had been over before it had begun, with Julius, and while Frederick had made a token protest with Vesper, with this child he only sighed), Johanna doesn't turn as she hears her husband approach, his footsteps quiet but the uncomfortable cough distinctive. When he is standing just over her shoulder, she sighs, careful not to jostle the almost-sleeping infant awake, and whispers, "When I'd said I didn't care what the baby was, this wasn't precisely what I meant." The joke comes out more of a soft, sad hiccup, though not enough to disturb the baby awake.

Frederick lays his hand on her shoulder gently. "We'll have to decide. I suppose if we're wrong, we'll find out eventually."

They name the baby Cassandra.

 

* * *

The baby grows, as babies do.

They dress Cassandra in the well-worn, soft infant clothes that had been new with Julius and somewhat worn with Vesper, because if a baby is going to inevitably make a mess, why fuss about fancy fabrics? Frederick returns to his study, the business of being a Lord, and once the baby is weaned Johanna allows the nursemaids that look after the older children to take over. The nursemaids dote on Cassandra—so clever, so serious!—and encourage first steps, first picture books, first words (" _No_ " followed shortly by "Bird!" with pudgy toddler fingers pointing excitedly at a raven perched on a branch outside the nursery window).

Not long after Cassandra's first words, Lady Johanna falls pregnant again. When she successfully delivers twins, the whole castle pretend to be relieved only that mother and both infants survive. No one breathes life into the thought they all share:

_At least they came out normal._

The twins are healthy, loud boys, and their arrival is as if a heavy weight has been lifted from Johanna's shoulders: she moves with a surety none would have said she'd lost except that it is clearly returned. She loves Cassandra, as dearly as the other four, but a superstitious part of her had feared a curse or some other evil done upon her while she was pregnant. When Keeper Yennen comes to bless the twins and officially bestow their names a month after their birth, if he looks relieved as well, none of them comment.

 

* * *

Cassandra watches the twins with an intensity that at first frightens the nursemaids (who worry about sibling bickering and rivalry and the loss of the treasured status of "youngest" and the general amorality of toddlers), but nothing ever comes of it. The adults decide it is irritation with the noise—the twins swiftly become the loudest in the nursery as Julius is sent to his first tutor to begin learning letters and numbers—and eventually Lady Johanna offers to let her third child play in her parlour  _if_  promises not to touch anything are extracted.

Clutching six picture books and smiling serenely, Cassandra agrees with all the fervour and lack of guile a two year old can possess.

It becomes a routine: Cassandra is alarmingly self-possessed for someone whose age is still frequently measured in months ("Vesper's doing, she'd boss the whole nursery if we let her.") and willing to be quiet to have quiet, so mornings are spent in Johanna's parlour and afternoons in the nursery. The Lady Johanna de Rolo's parlour has probably more books than the average noblewoman's and  _definitely_  more books about sorcery and adventure stories, but, then, agreeing to marry Frederick hadn't been the only interesting note in her life. She had agreed to settle down, not give up her personhood entirely, so she reads and writes to far-off friends and takes care of the business of running a household of what used to be a kingdom and what is now only a small city. Cassandra, by her desk or on pillows pulled off of the decorative and uncomfortable chaise longue near the window, flips through picture books or scribbles on a slate with chalk. Johanna, fondly, doesn't scold about the little fingerprints left on dark wood.

 

* * *

Lady Johanna falls pregnant for the fifth time when Cassandra is just past three. With the twins, Cassandra had been too young to understand any of what was happening—Mother grew very large and very tired and then there were two screaming things in the nursery all the time—but this time, Johanna explains and watches her clever third child try to make sense of it.

"The baby is going to be a boy or a girl?" They've had this discussion a score or more times. Johanna puts down her pen and shifts to look at Cassandra, standing by her chair. She runs her fingers through the dark, soft waves, and smiles tiredly.

"Yes, cub. You know that."

Cassandra's mouth twists, not quite a frown. "Mother?"

"Yes, cub?"

"Julius and Whitney and Oliver are boys, and Vesper is a girl, and the baby will be a girl or a boy." A pause, definitely frowning now. "What am I?"

Johanna blinks slowly, caught off-guard. Out of all the myriad possibilities she'd fretted over for this child, the simplest question somehow hadn't factored into her plans about what to say and when. At a loss, she bends uncomfortably around her belly to lift Cassandra into her lap, still smoothing errant hair, until she feels the child relax against her. Neither speak, Cassandra drifting unwillingly into a nap by the soothing touch. Tucking the blankets around slim shoulders, later, Johanna worries she has made an unfixable error.

 

* * *

The sixth de Rolo child is a boy, quieter than the twins, though moreso out of illness than intent. Ludwig is blessed and named early, he is so small and slow to thrive. This has the unfortunate by-product of necessitating more regular care and attention from Johanna. The Lord and Lady hire additional help, in tutors and additional nursemaids for the older five children, and fret. (Ludwig does eventually grow, and they do eventually fret less. Somewhat.)

Julius, now seven, spends most of his time with tutors and begins to learn to wield a sword—not a skill his parents hope he will need, but one he should know, as the oldest and heir. Vesper, six, spends every moment she is not with her tutors with books in the garden, trying to piece together the words about how each plant grows and the clever things her nursemaid shows her. She chatters endlessly about magic and fairies and always finds a captive audience in Cassandra. (Once, when they are meant to be asleep but haven't quite made it there yet, Vesper turns on her side to Cassandra and announces, "I think you must be a changeling. It's why you're so strange." Cassandra shrugs into the darkness. "Yeah. Okay.") Whitney and Oliver, not quite two, spend most of their time in the typical toddler pursuits of build-destroy-shriek with laughter-repeat.

Cassandra turns four not long after Ludwig is born and the safety of Johanna's parlour is revoked in favour of the sickly infant. After some discussion amongst the adults, a tutor is hired for the third de Rolo, who is eager to begin lessons after learning to read entirely independently. ("We ought to warn you, Cassandra is...a little odd. In many ways," Lord Frederick explains to the tutor hired from Wildmount on the highest of recommendations for what to do with unusual, clever children after a subtle inquiry had been put out by Keeper Yennen on their behalf. The tutor merely blinks placidly, mouth curving up into the hint of a smile, which would be a perfectly benign expression on any other face but is mildly alarming on a gold dragonborn. Frederick hires her on the spot.)

Drakka is a good match for Cassandra, patient when it counts but firm enough to ensure compliance without too many complaints. Cassandra, who has never met a dragonborn before, is delighted—Vesper and Julius have  _human_  tutors. Under her instruction, Johanna watches her third child flourish, the quiet toddler replaced by an excited four- and then five-year-old who takes to studying natural philosophy as much as Julius has found joy in the physics of fighting and Vesper in the gardens.

 

* * *

After some deliberation about the utility of one foreign language over another, a fourth tutor is hired specifically to teach the three eldest Elvish. Whitestone is remote, but Elvish is the language of commerce further south, and of many of the arts. It is to their luck that a well-spoken cartographer happens to be staying at the temple of Erathis when they decide, and she is gracious enough to agree to stay for a time for this. She is a small, blonde Elven woman with smiling eyes, full of stories and myths woven between explanations of how to hold one's mouth just so to say  _mother_ or  _home_ , and she draws the children maps of the places she has travelled for Syngorn to illustrate her lessons.

Cassandra returns to Drakka one afternoon after an Elvish lesson, frowning and fidgeting—not unusual, but when the continuation of the morning lesson about a specific way to do sums fails to draw full attention, she pauses.

"Little cub—" (she hadn't  _meant_  to pick up the endearment from Lady Johanna, who had not meant to pass it along in the first place) "what's troubling you?"

Lips pressed together, eyes worried and looking for an escape route, Cassandra shrugs a little. "I don't know."

A laugh nearly escapes Drakka, who turns it into a cough. "You know more than I do in this."

Slim shoulders rise and then fall with a sigh more fitting of a much older, sadder person. "Tutor Devana was telling us about Corellon, the god of the Elves, and I just…" another shrug, "I think maybe there was a mistake and I was meant to be an Elf or something. Vesper says I'm a changeling and that's why I am the way that I am." Blue eyes look up at gold, full of tears waiting to spill over at the slightest provocation.

Drakka places a hand on Cassandra's shoulder, squeezing gently. "You were meant to be here, with your family. But, you know, if you don't like who you are right now, you don't have to be this way forever." She considers human lifespans, and smiles fondly, voice grave, "Five isn't nearly so grown up as that." Cassandra hiccups, the tears falling, and throws skinny arms around Drakka in a tight hug.

 

* * *

The seventh de Rolo child is born in the middle of the day in late spring, the scent of roses and ripening vegetables drifting in the windows on a warm breeze and with the sun  _just so_  to light the deep gold tuft of hair on her head like a blessing from Pelor as she is handed up to her exhausted mother.

Later, after a bath and a nap, Lady Johanna allows in each of her children in to meet their newest sister. Julius appraises her with all of his almost-eleven-year-old gravitas and pronounces her " _Beautiful_ ;" Vesper brings freshly picked and dethorned roses from the garden (evidence of the dethorning hidden by sheer, loose long sleeves). The twins and Ludwig come in together, five and three, curious but easily distracted again by their nursemaids as Johanna grows visibly tired and the baby wakes to nurse. Cassandra comes last and alone, a little later, looking sheepish and apprehensive.

"Did you have a name for her yet?" Fingers twist together briefly before some remembered lesson about fidgeting sends them into pockets.

Lady Johanna smiles at her strangest child, tired but warm. "Not yet. Did you have a suggestion?"

It comes out almost as a whisper: "Maybe she could be Cassandra, and I could be something else." Cassandra looks anywhere but at her face, unwilling to see the disappointment that must be there. That is what causes the crack in Johanna's heart for her third child to truly break, sadness flooding through her like a river breaching a levee.

"Oh,  _cub_ ," she says, offering the hand not currently supporting the sleeping newborn, and then tugging until they are both sitting on the bed and Johanna can hold the scared, worried child close. "What did you have in mind?"

Whatever reaction had been expected, this clearly is not it, blue eyes searching Johanna's face for some guarantee that this isn't an elaborate joke.

"Well...we've been learning about genealogy and the history of Whitestone, and I know we all have Family Names." Johanna listens, stroking back dark hair.

 

* * *

Keeper Yennen performs the naming ceremony for the youngest de Rolo as he has for the previous six, offering her the blessings of Pelor one month after her birth. In the same steady hand he has used for all of his record keeping, he notes her name ( _Cassandra Johanna von Musel Klossowski de Rolo_ ) into the ledger with her birthdate.

Yennen turns to the seven year old, hair freshly trimmed to match his brothers', in a blue surcoat embroidered with gold and white that emphasizes the blueness of his eyes and the gold of his new, much needed glasses, and smiles fondly. "It seems you are in need of a new name, since you gave yours away." The boy nods, expression solemn, and Yennen begins the ceremony for the second time that day.

Stepping out of the temple and into the warmth of early summer in Whitestone, Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III's smile could rival the sun.


End file.
